Photography and Fetish
Christian Metz
October, Vol. 34. (Autumn, 1985), pp. 81-90.
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Mon Oct 29 13:42:38 2007
Photography and Fetish* CHRISTIAN METZ
T o begin I will briefly recall some of the basic differences between film and
photography. Although these differences may be well known, they must be,
as far as possible, precisely defined, since they have a determinant influence on
the respective status of both forms of expression in relation to the fetish and
fetishism.
First difference: the spatio-temporal size of the lexis, according to that
term's definition as proposed by the Danish semiotician Louis Hjelmslev. The
lexis is the socialized unit of reading, of reception: in sculpture, the statue; in
music, the "piece." Obviously the photographic lexis, a silent rectangle of paper,
is much smaller than the cinematic lexis. Even when the film is only two minutes long, these two minutes are enlarged, so to speak, by sounds, movements,
and so forth, to say nothing of the average surface of the screen and of the very
fact of projection. In addition, the photographic lexis has no fixed duration
( = temporal size): it depends, rather, on the spectator, who is the master of
the look, whereas the timing of the cinematic lexis is determined in advance by
the filmmaker. Thus on the one side, "a free rewriting time"; on the other, "an
imposed reading time," as Peter Wollen has pointed out.' Thanks to these two
features (smallness, possibility of a lingering look), photography is better fit, or
more likely, to work as a fetish.
Another important difference pertains to the social use, or more exactly
(as film and photography both have many uses) to their principal legitimated
use. Film is considered as collective entertainment or as art, according to the
work and to the social group. This is probably due to the fact that its production
is less accessible to "ordinary" people than that of photography. Equally, it is in
most cases fictional, and our culture still has a strong tendency to confound art
with fiction. Photography enjoys a high degree of social recognition in another
*
A version of this essay was delivered at a conference on the theory of film and photography
at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in May 1984.
1.
Peter Wollen, "Fire and Ice," Photogruphies, 4 (1984).
82
OCTOBER domain: that of the presumed real, of life, mostly private and family life, birthplace of the Freudian fetish. This recognition is ambiguous. Up to a point, it
does correspond to a real distribution of social practices: people do take photographs of their children, and when they want their feature film, they do go to
the movies or watch TV. But on the other side, it happens that photographs are
considered by society as works of art, presented in exhibitions or in albums accompanied by learned commentary. And the family is frequently celebrated, or
self-celebrated, in private, with super-8 films or other nonprofessional productions, which are still cinema. Nevertheless, the kinship between film and collectivity, photography and privacy, remains alive and strong as a social myth, half
true like all myths; it influences each of us, and most of all the stamp, the look
of photography and cinema themselves. It is easy to observe - and the researches
others, confirm it - that photography
of the sociologist Pierre B o r d i e ~among
,~
very often primarily means souvenir, keepsake. It has replaced the portrait,
thanks to the historical transition from the period when long exposure times
were needed for true portraits. While the social reception of film is mainly oriented towards a show-business-like or imaginary referent, the real referent is
felt to be dominant in photography.
There is something strange in this discrepancy, as both modes of expression are fundamentally indexical, in Charles Sanders Pierce's terms. (A recent,
remarkable book on photography by Philippe Dubois is devoted to the elaboration of this idea and its implication^.)^ Pierce called indexical the process of signification (semiosis) in which the signifier is bound to the referent not by a social
convention ( = "symbol"), not necessarily by some similarity ( = "icon"), but
by an actual contiguity or connection in the world: the lightning is the index of
the storm. In this sense, film and photography are close to each other, both are
prints of real objects, prints left on a special surface by a combination of light
and chemical action. This indexicality, of course, leaves room for iconic aspects,
as the chemical image often looks like the object (Pierce considered photography as an index and an icon). It leaves much room for symbolic aspects as well,
such as the more or less codified patterns of treatment of the image (framing,
lighting, and so forth) and of choice or organization of its contents. What is indexical is the mode of production itself, the principle of the taking. And at this
point, after all, a film is only a series of photographs. But it is more precisely
a series with supplementary components as well, so that the unfolding as such
tends to become more important than the link of each image with its referent.
This property is very often exploited by the narrative, the initially indexical
power of the cinema turning frequently into a realist guarantee for the unreal.
Pierre Bordieu et al., U n art moyen. Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie, Paris, Edi2.
tions de Minuit, 1965.
Philippe Dubois, L'mtephotographique, Paris and Brussels, Nathan and Labor, 1983.
3.
Photography and Fetish
Photography, on the other hand, remains closer to the pure index, stubbornly
pointing to the print of what was,but no longer is.
A third kind of difference concerns the physical nature of the respective
signifiers. Lacan used to say that the only materialism he knew was the materialism of the signifier. Whether the only one or not, in all signifying practices
the material definition is essential to their social and psychoanalytic inscription.
In this respect - speaking in terms of set theory - film "includes" photography:
cinema results from an addition of perceptive features to those of photography.
In the visual sphere, the important addition is, of course, movement and the
plurality of images, of shots. The latter is distinct from the former: even if each
image is still, switching from one to the next creates a second movement, an ideal
one, made out of successive and different immobilities. Movement and plurality
both imply time, as opposed to the timelessness of photography which is comparable to the timelessness of the unconscious and of memory. In the auditory
sphere - totally absent in photography- cinema adds phonic sound (spoken
words), nonphonic sound (sound effects, noises, and so forth), and musical
sound. One of the properties of sounds is their expansion, their development in
time (in space they only irradiate), whereas images construct themselves in
space. Thus film disposes of five more orders of perception (two visual and
three auditory) than does photography, all of the five challenging the powers of
silence and immobility which belong to and define all photography, immersing
film in a stream of temporality where nothing can be kept, nothing stopped.
The emergence of a fetish is thus made more difficult.
Cinema is the product of two distinct technological inventions: photography, and the mastering of stroboscopy, of the +-effect. Each of these can be
exploited separately: photography makes no use of stroboscopy, and animated
cartoons are based on stroboscopy without photography.
The importance of immobility and silence to photographic authority, the
nonfilmic nature of this authority, leads me to some remarks on the relationship
of photography with death. Immobility and silence are not only two objective
aspects of death, they are also its main symbols, theyjgure it. Photography's
deeply rooted kinship with death has been noted by many different authors,
including Dubois, who speaks of photography as a "thanatography," and, of
course, Roland Barthes, whose Camera Lucida4bears witness to this relationship
most poignantly. It is not only the book itself but also its position of enunciation
which illustrates this kinship, since the work was written just after (and because
of) the death of the mother, and just before the death of the writer.
4.
Roland Barthes, C a m a Lucida, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981.
OCTOBER Photography is linked with death in many dz$eent ways. The most immediate and explicit is the social practice of keeping photographs in memory of
loved beings who are no longer alive. But there another real death which each
of us undergoes every day, as each day we draw nearer our own death. Even
when the person photographed is still living, that moment when she or he was
has forever vanished. Strictly speaking, the person who has been photographed- not
the total person, who is an effect of time- is dead: "dead for having been seen,"
as Dubois says in another context.5 Photography is the mirror, more faithful
than any actual mirror, in which we witness at every age, our own aging. The
actual mirror accompanies us through time, thoughtfully and treacherously; it
changes with us, so that we appear not to change.
Photography has a third character in common with death: the snapshot,
like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into
another world, into another kind of time-unlike cinema which replaces the
object, after the act of appropriation, in an unfolding time similar to that of life.
The photographic take is immediate and definitive, like death and like the constitution of the fetish in the unconscious, fixed by a glance in childhood, unchanged and always active later. Photography is a cut inside the referent, it
cuts off a piece of it, a fragment, a part object, for a long immobile travel of no
return. Dubois remarks that with each photograph, a tiny piece of time brutally
and forever escapes its ordinary fate, and thus is protected against its own loss.
I will add that in life, and to some extent in film, one piece of time is indefinitely
pushed backwards by the next: this is what we call "forgetting." The fetish, too,
means both loss (symbolic castration) and protection against loss. Peter Wollen
states this in an apt simile: photography preserves fragments of the past "like
flies in amber."6 Not by chance, the photographic act (or acting, who knows?)
has been frequently compared with shooting, and the camera with a gun.
Against what I am saying, it could of course be objected that film as well is
able to perpetuate the memory of dead persons, or of dead moments of their
lives. Socially, the family film, the super-8, and so forth, to which I previously
alluded, are often used for such a purpose. But this pseudosimilarity between
film and photography leads me back, in a paradoxical way, to the selective kinship of photography (not film) with death, and to a fourth aspect of this link.
The two modes of perpetuation are very different in their effects, and nearly
opposed. Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance
but one immediately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer. Photography, on the contrary, by virtue of the objective suggestions of its signifier
(stillness, again) maintains the memory of the dead as being dead.
5.
6.
Dubois, p. 89.
Wollen. Ibid.
Photography and Fetish
85
Tenderness toward loved beings who have left us forever is a deeply ambiguous, split feeling, which Freud has remarkably analyzed in his famous
study on Mourning and Melancholia. The work of mourning is at the same time
an attempt (not successful in all cases: see the suicides, the breakdowns) to survive. The object-libido, attached to the loved person, wishes to accompany her
or him in death, and sometimes does. Yet the narcissistic, conservation instinct
(ego-libido) claims the right to live. The compromise which normally concludes
this inner struggle consists in transforming the very nature of the feeling for the
object, in learning progressively to love this object as dead, instead of continuing
to desire a living presence and ignoring the verdict of reality, hence prolonging
the intensity of suffering.
Sociologists and anthropologists arrive by other means at similar conceptions. The funeral rites which exist in all societies have a double, dialectically
articulated signification: a remembering of the dead, but a remembering as well
that they are dead, and that life continues for others. Photography, much better
than film, fits into this complex psycho-social operation, since it suppresses from
its own appearance the primary marks of "livingness," and nevertheless conserves the convincing print of the object: a past presence.
All this does not concern only the photographs of loved ones. There are
obviously many other kinds of photographs: landscapes, artistic compositions,
and so forth. But the kind on which I have insisted seems to me to be exemplary
of the whole domain. In all photographs, we have this same act of cutting off a
piece of space and time, of keeping it unchanged while the world around continues to change, of making a compromise between conservation and death.
The frequent use of photography for private commemorations thus results in
part (there are economic and social factors, too) from the intrinsic characteristics
of photography itself. In contrast, film is less a succession of photographs than,
to a large extent, a destruction of the photograph, or more exactly of the photograph's power and action.
At this point, the problem of the space off-frame in film and in photography
has to be raised. The fetish is related to death through the terms of castration
and fear, to the off-frame in terms of the look, glance, or gaze. In his well-known
considers that the child, when discovering for the
article on f e t i ~ h i s mFreud
,~
first time the mother's body, is terrified by the very possibility that human beings
7.
Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-1974, vol. 14.
8.
Freud, "Fetishism,"S. E. , vol. 21.
86
OCTOBER
can be "deprivedn of the penis, a possibility which implies (imaginarily) a permanent danger of castration. The child tries to maintain its prior conviction
that all human beings have the penis, but in opposition to this, what has been
seen continues to work strongly and to generate anxiety. The compromise,
more or less spectacular according to the person, consists in making the seen
retrospectively unseen by a disavowal of the perception, and in stopping the look,
once and for all, on an object, the fetish- generally a piece of clothing or underclothing- which was, with respect to the moment of the primal glance, near,
just prior to, the place of the terrifying absence. From our perspective, what
does this mean, if not that this place is positioned off-frame, that the look is
framed close by the absence? Furthermore, we can state that the fetish is taken
up in two chains of meaning: metonymically, it alludes to the contiguous place
of the lack, as I have just stated; and metaphorically, according to Freud's conception, it is an equivalent of the penis, as the primordial displacement of the
look aimed at replacing an absence by a presence- an object, a small object, a
part object. It is remarkable that the fetish- even in the common meaning of the
word, the fetish in everyday life, a re-displaced derivative of the fetish proper,
the object which brings luck, the mascot, the amulet, a fountain pen, cigarette,
lipstick, a teddybear, or pet - it is remarkable that the fetish always combines a
double and contradictory function: on the side of metaphor, an inciting and encouraging one (it is a pocket phallus); and, on the side of metonymy, an apotropaic one, that is, the averting of danger (thus involuntarily attesting a belief
in it), the warding off of bad luck or the ordinary, permanent anxiety which
sleeps (or suddenly wakes up) inside each of us. In the clinical, nosographic,
"abnormal" forms of fetishism-or in the social institution of the striptease,
which pertains to a collective nosography and which is, at the same time, a progressive process of framingldeframing- pieces of clothing or various other objects are absolutely necessary for the restoration of sexual power. Without them
nothing can happen.
Let us return to the problem of off-frame space. The difference which
separates film and photography in this respect has been partially but acutely
analyzed by Pascal Bonitzer.9 The filmic off-frame space is ttoflk, let us say
"substantial," whereas the photographic off-frame space is "subtle." In film there
is a plurality of successive frames, of camera movements, and character movements, so that a person or an object which is off-frame in a given moment may
appear inside the frame the moment after, then disappear again, and so on, according to the principle ( I purposely exaggerate) of the turnstile. The off-frame
is taken into the evolutions and scansions of the temporal flow: it is off-frame,
but not off-film. Furthermore, the very existence of a sound track allows a character who has deserted the visual scene to continue to mark her or his presence
9.
Pascal Bonitzer, "Le hors-champ subtil," Cuhiers du c i n h , no. 311 (May 1980).
Photography and Fetish
87
in the auditory scene (if I can risk this quasi-oxymoron: "auditory" and "scene").
If the filmic off-frame is substantial, it is because we generally know, or are able
to guess more or less precisely, what is going on in it. The character who is offframe in a photograph, however, will never come into the frame, will never be
heard- again a death, another form of death. The spectator has no empirical
knowledge of the contents of the off-frame, but at the same time cannot help
imagining some off-frame, hallucinating it, dreaming the shape of this emptiness. It is a projective off-frame (that of the cinema is more introjective), an immaterial, "subtlen one, with no remaining print. "Excluded," to use Dubois's
term, excluded once and for all. Yet nevertheless present, striking, properly
fascinating (or hypnotic)- insisting on its status as excluded by the force of its
absence inside the rectangle of paper, which reminds us of the feeling of lack in
the Freudian theory of the fetish. For Barthes, the only part of a photograph
which entails the feeling of an off-frame space is what he calls the punctum, the
point of sudden and strong emotion, of small trauma; it can be a tiny detail.
This punctum depends more on the reader than on the photograph itself, and the
corresponding off-frame it calls up is also generally subjective; it is the "metonymic expansion of the pun~tum."'~
Using these strikingly convergent analyses which I have freely summed
up, I would say that the off-frame effect in photography results from a singular
and definitive cutting off which figures castration and is figured by the "clicknof
the shutter. It marks the place of an irreversible absence, a place from which
the look has been averted forever. The photograph itself, the "in-frame," the
abducted part-space, the place of presence and fullness- although undermined
and haunted by the feeling of its exterior, of its borderlines, which are the past,
the left, the lost: the far away even if very close by, as in Walter Benjamin's
conception of the "auran" - the photograph, inexhaustible reserve of strength
and anxiety, shares, as we see, many properties of the fetish (as object), if not
directly of fetishism (as activity). The familiar photographs that many people
carry with them always obviously belong to the order of fetishes in the ordinary
sense of the word.
Film is much more difficult to characterize as a fetish. It is too big, it lasts
too long, and it addresses too many sensorial channels at the same time to offer
a credible unconscious equivalent of a lacking part-object. It does contain many
potential part-objects (the different shots, the sounds, and so forth), but each of
them disappears quickly after a moment of presence, whereas a fetish has to be
kept, mastered, held, like the photograph in the pocket. Film is, however, an
extraordinary activator of fetishism. It endlessly mimes the primal displacement of the look between the seen absence and the presence nearby. Thanks to
10.
Barthes, p. 45.
1 1 . Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography," trans. Phil Patton, Classic Essays on
Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg, New Haven, Conn., Leete's Island Books, 1980.
88
OCTOBER
the principle of a moving cutting 05thanks to the changes of framing between
shots (or within a shot: tracking, panning, characters moving into or out of the
frame, and so forth), cinema literally plays with the terror and the pleasure of
fetishism, with its combination of desire and fear. This combination is particularly visible, for instance, in the horror film, which is built upon progressive reframings that lead us through desire and fear, nearer and nearer the terrifying
place. More generally, the play of framings and the play with framings, in all
sorts of films, work like a striptease of the space itself (and a striptease proper
in erotic sequences, when they are constructed with some subtlety). The moving
camera caresses the space, and the whole of cinematic fetishism consists in the
constant and teasing displacement of the cutting line which separates the seen
from the unseen. But this game has no end. Things are too unstable and there
are too many of them on the screen. It is not simple - although still possible, of
course, depending on the character of each spectator- to stop and isolate one
of these objects, to make it able to work as a fetish. Most of all, a film cannot be
touched, cannot be carried and handled: although the actual reels can, the projected film cannot.
I will deal more briefly with the last difference - and the problem of beliefdisbelief- since I have already spoken of it. As pointed out by Octave Mannoni,l*
Freud considered fetishism the prototype of the cleavage of belief: "I know very
well, but. . . ." In this sense, film and photography are basically similar. The
spectator does not confound the signifier with the referent, she or he knows
what a representation is, but nevertheless has a strange feeling of reality (a denial
of the signifier). This is a classical theme of film theory.
But the very nature of what we believe in is not the same in film and photography. If I consider the two extreme points of the scale - there are, of course,
intermediate cases: still shots in films, large and filmlike photographs, for example - I would say that film is able to call up our belief for long and complex
dispositions of actions and characters (in narrative cinema) or of images and
sounds (in experimental cinema), to disseminate belief; whereas photography
is able to fix it, to concentrate it, to spend it all at the same time on a single
object. Its poverty constitutes its force-I speak of a poverty of means, not of
significance. The photographic effect is not produced from diversity, from itinerancy or inner migrations, from multiple juxtapositions or arrangements. It is
the effect, rather, of a laser or lightning, a sudden and violent illumination on a
limited and petrified surface: again the fetish and death. Where film lets us
believe in more things, photography lets us believe more in one thing.
12. Octave Mannoni, "Je sais bien mais quand m&me..
sckre, Paris, Seuil, 1969.
. ," Clefs tour l'imaginaire;
ou, L'autre
Photography and Fetish
In conclusion, I should like to add some remarks on the use of psychoanalysis in the study of film, photography, theater, literature, and so on. First,
there are presentations, like this one, which are less "psychoanalytic" than it
might seem. The notion of "fetish," and the word, were not invented by Freud;
he took them from language, life, the history of cultures, anthropology. He
proposed an interpretation of fetishism. This interpretation, in my opinion, is not
fully satisfactory. It is obvious that it applies primarily to the early evolution of
the young boy. (Incidentally, psychoanalysts often state that the recorded clinical cases of fetishism are for the most part male.) The fear of castration and its
further consequence, its "fate," are necessarily different, at least partially, in
children whose body is similar to the mother's. The Lacanian notion of the
phallus, a symbolic organ distinct from the penis, the real organ, represents a
step forward in theory; yet it is still the case that within the description of the
human subject that psychoanalysis gives us, the male features are often dominant, mixed with (and as) general features. But apart from such distortions or
silences, which are linked to a general history, other aspects of Freud's thinking, and various easily accessible observations which confirm it, remain fully
valid. These include: the analysis of the fetishistic nature of male desire; in
both sexes the "willing suspension of disbelief' (to use the well-known AngloSaxon notion), a suspension which is determinant in all representative arts, in
everyday life (mostly in order to solve problems by half-solutions), and in the
handling of ordinary fetishes; the fetishistic pleasure of framing-deframing.
It is impossible to use a theory, to "apply" it. That which is so called involves, in fact, two aspects more distinct than one might at first believe: the
intrinsic degree of perfection of the theory itself, and its power of suggestion, of
activation, of enlightenment in anotherfield studied by other researchers. I feel
that psychoanalysis has this power in the fields of the humanities and social
sciences because it is an acute and profound discovery. It has helped me- the
personal coefficient of each researcher always enters into the account, despite
the ritual declarations of the impersonality of science- to explore one of the
many possible paths through the complex problem of the relationship between
cinema and photography. I have, in other words, used the theory of fetishism
as a fetish.
Psychoanalysis, as Raymond Bellour has often underscored, is contemporary in our Western history with the technological arts (such as cinema) and
with the reign of the patriarchal, nuclear, bourgeois family. O u r period has invented neurosis (at least in its current form), and the remedy for it (it has often
been so for all kinds of diseases). It is possible to consider psychoanalysis as the
founding myth of our emotional modernity. In his famous study of the Oedipus
myth, LCvi-Strauss has suggested that the Freudian interpretation of this myth
(the central one in psychoanalysis, as everybody knows) could be nothing but
90
OCTOBER
the last variant of the myth itself.'3 This was not an attempt to blame: myths
are always true, even if indirectly and by hidden ways, for the good reason that
they are invented by the natives themselves, searching for a parable of their
own fate.
After this long digression, I turn back to my topic and purpose, only to
state that they could be summed up in one sentence: film is more capable of
playing on fetishism, photography more capable of itself becoming a fetish.
13. Claude L6vi-Strauss,Anthropologie stnrcturale, Chapter 1 1 , "La structure des mythes,"Paris,
Plon, 1958; translated as Structural Anthropolou, New York, Basic Books, 1963.